I’m watching Mona Lisa Smile and I want to talk about how much things have changed for us, for women in particular, and though I see political changes that are significant, the other changes to me seem largely superficial, like band aids. I want to talk about choice here, because choice is what is at the core of this film, though the trailer tells me: “A free-thinking art professor teaches conservative 50's Wellesley girls to question their traditional societal roles.” The plot summary: “Set in 1953, Katherine Watson (Roberts) is a free-spirited graduate of UCLA who accepts a teaching post at Wellesley College, a women-only school where the students are torn between the repressive mores of the time and their longing for intellectual freedom.” It’s true that Roberts does call upon the girls to question their traditional roles, but it is equally true that in this film, Roberts’ (Professor Katherine Ann Watson) is forced to confront her own ideas about her idealized self and the role that she has chosen for herself and accept that maybe she would like a piece of their cake as well as her own.
I look at this portrait of Wellesley in the fifties and I don’t see so much that is different in many young girls today. Aren’t many still waiting for the right guy to propose? Is that what all the make up that I’ve written about is for? The Orgasm colored blush, the smoky eyes, the I’ve just had boot banging sex look that is poor substitute for the real thing, because heaven forefend we soil our perfect and virgin selves and mess up those two hundred dollar highlights and that blowout - blowout, for heavens sake… we’re now back to being chained to the salon like a gorgeous Julie Christy, which seems antiquated to me. All this talk and time spent waiting for the right guy, and where and how we’ll meet him, because now, now, unlike in the fifties, things have changed in that we work – which is great, and we almost get as much money as our male counterparts, though still a quarter short or so, but hey, we have the privilege of working and cant’ complain about that. Shhhh…they’ll say we complain about everything. That we’re never happy.
Is it really so wrong to want to be both like our friend the Professor and like her young, and oh-so-willing lily white students and gloved students (among them, Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles and many other notables, most of whom practically marinade themselves in preparation for the perfect man, with the exception of the incredibly hot Maggie Gyllenhaal who seems more interested in getting laid by the Italian Professor (Dominic West, who plays Bill Dunbar). Isn’t it okay to want to be superwoman at work and at home, and to be Supermom, too, for that matter. A saint in the kitchen and home, a whore in the bedroom. Since when was it not okay to at least want and desire to be great at all of those things, even if that’s not possible for most of us. In short, do we have to pick just one, and who the hell is anyone else to judge your choice, whatever that choice may be?
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